From Dunkeld, in Perthshire, in Scotland, beside the A9 (the major route through northern Scotland), the A822, a mixture of former drovers’ routes and military roads, heads west, and then south, for around 16 miles in total, ascending to forlorn, blasted heathland that is very dear to me. Every year, we — my wife, my son and I — visit my wife’s family in Edinburgh for Christmas, and every Boxing Day my wife and I leave our son with his grandparents, drive north to the Highlands, in Perthshire, and stay one night in a hotel. The following day, we return via this stretch of the A822, which passes through a particularly beautiful, but largely unknown part of the Highlands.

This landscape never fails to provide a reminder that, just around the corner from places where humans have settled for hundreds of years, or for millennia, are other places that have proven far more inhospitable. The highest pass on this road between Dunkeld and Crieff is a sublime example of this, where a strip of road runs across boggy, wind-swept land that has repulsed all those who have tried to tame it by living here. The road remains, as do electric pylons and, somewhere nearby, a wind farm, but no permanent settlements still stand. Read the rest of this entry »